NEW YORK AP - The Secretary of the Army on Wednesday directed the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to review its hiring practices, bar outside groups from choosing employees and remove a newly announced hire who led the nation's cybersecurity agency under President Joe Biden.
The directive, shared on the social platform X by Secretary Dan Driscoll, came just a day after Jen Easterly was announced as the Robert F. McDermott Distinguished Chair in West Point's social sciences department.
It demonstrated how vigorously President Donald Trump's administration has sought to wield control over the ideology and leadership of higher education and the military during the president's second term.
It also highlighted how deeply concerns about censorship have seeped into the Republican Party and the Trump administration. As the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, Easterly faced harsh criticism from Republicans who argued that her work to counter misinformation about elections and the COVID-19 pandemic amounted to censorship.
CISA secures the nation's critical infrastructure, including the nation's dams, banks and nuclear power plants. It also secures voting systems - work that became controversial as Trump has made false claims to create doubt about the integrity of elections in recent years.